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Defense will outsource travel

May 26, 1997

Under a new Defense Travel System, travel arrangements will shift from DOD to commercial travel agents. DOD staff will enter information at their PCs into the Common User Interface (CUI), which the travel agents will be able to access.

In many cases, DOD has spent more money administering travel services than on the travel itself, according to department estimates. Travel administration has cost DOD between $60 to $100 per trip for military personnel on temporary duty (TDY) assignments.

Multiply that by 5 million room nights per year booked by the Pentagon and the 1.3 million DOD travelers who took the bus in 1996, and the enormity of the problem becomes clear, DOD officials said.

"Anybody that's ever gone TDY knows how cumbersome the current process is from the orders to the vouchers to the arrangements," said Col. Albert Arnold, DTS project manager.

"There's a lot of steps, and what we found was it was a mission just to do the TDY. We do the TDYs for the mission and that's what we should be focusing on, not the reverse. Travel administration is not and should not be one of the DOD core competencies."

To achieve the department's vision of a seamless, paperless and less costly DTS, DOD is decentralizing the process and putting greater responsibility in the hands of the travelers and their supervisors. The department has streamlined the procedures used to approve military travel and reimburse DOD travelers. It also has simplified the entitlements and statutory requirements associated with TDY travel.

DOD is now encouraging the use of travel credit cards and will allow split-disbursement-reimbursing a traveler's personal account and a government charge card account within five days. But the department plans random audits to help ensure that honesty and integrity prevail, Arnold said.

"This is going to be a travel system for anybody in DOD that does TDY travel," Arnold said. "We are outsourcing and procuring travel services. We're not buying information technology. We certainly understand that IT will be used to provide us with these travel services but I'm not buying a computer for every desk. We can't afford that."

DOD will require that under the DTS all transactions be handled using electronic data interchange. The traveler will initiate a travel request with the CUI, which generates a trip record with estimates for a traveler's boss to approve. The CUI will also generate a housing and transportation request for action by the commercial travel office (CTO).

After the trip, the traveler will submit expense data and reimbursement forms using the CUI. The system will route the record to the traveler's boss for approval and then forward it to the disbursing office. DOD will keep an archival database of the trip records.

There are five steps in the process: "authorize trips before we go, approve the payments for reimbursement, do the random audit, post payment and, of course, the final accounting," Arnold said.

Initial tests at 27 pilot sites throughout DOD found the system reduced travel processing times from 13 hours to one hour. The department will implement the new system at each of its 10 Defense travel regions (DTRs) on a piecemeal basis, Arnold said.

"We have a standards profile for our travel system," he said. "It's based on the joint tactical architecture. We plan to eventually migrate to the Defense Information Infrastructure. That's what it's all about in the IT community. We can't get there from here if we don't base it on standards."

DTR 6, 11 states and 70 installations in the upper Midwest stretching from North Dakota to Kentucky, will serve as DOD's first guinea pig for the DTS. Arnold's office will release a request for proposals for DTR 6 travel services early this summer and award a contract in November.

DOD will implement the Defense Travel System in DTR 6 early next year. If it's successful, the department will roll it out to the additional regions later in 1998 and 1999.

"We're not putting out a statement of work in our RFP," Arnold said. "We're putting out a requirements document and its part of the proposal that vendors will provide to us. They're going to write their own SOW telling us how they're going to do it. We're not going to tell them how to do it. To me that's real outsourcing. That's using best industry practices."

Despite the Defense Travel System's approach that assumes travelers are honest and responsible, DOD is working to keep fraud in check by pursuing an electronic signature capability. Digital signatures will ensure that travelers are entitled to funds and that officials have the authority to authorize travel, Arnold said.

"We have a significant effort ongoing right now with digital signature," he said.

The Defense Finance and Accounting Service will perform accounting functions, disburse funds based on CUI computations, conduct prepayment audits, and assist with random post-payment audits.